I was awake this morning at 1:30am. Sleep fled for the remainder of the night and I finally got out of bed at 5am, tired and sore from tossing and turning. It’s been this way for the past three days now. Couple hours of sleep, then nothing. So I’m running quite a sleep deficit. It doesn’t help that I also seem to have caught a head cold. Not real severe, but just enough to stop up the sinuses and cause an occasional raspy cough. The bed at the place we were staying really didn’t help either. It was quite soft, probably made of something like memory foam, so you would sink deeply into it. It felt like I was sleeping on pudding. It was a nice place and we enjoyed it a lot, but the beds could certainly use an upgrade.
Time to leave this area and move on to the next phase of our trip: the memorial gathering for Aunt Nancy. We certainly have covered a lot of ground over the last four days. I mapped our travels and we have covered the area around Alma pretty thoroughly. It helped greatly that we had a 4-wheel-drive Jeep. Many of the roads would be impassable by ordinary passenger cars.
After packing up and stuffing all our luggage in the Jeep, we drove to Beaver Creek for a walk in the woods. A fairly level trail (rather unusual in these parts) meandered through the woods for a couple miles.
We also drove the Beaver Creek Road for several miles until it grew considerably worse and entered private land. Beaver Creek is so named because of many beaver dams which create a marshy area for most of its length. Evidence of the beavers can be seen not only by the dams, but by the many tree stumps that have been chewed off.
Several people were disperse-camping along this road. Looked like some great campsites with fantastic scenery and really being away from it all. We wondered a little bit what they did while camping until we saw a guy down in the creek, panning for gold. I didn’t know they still did that, but, apparently it’s still a thing.
We stopped for a little while in the town of Como. Established during the gold rush of 1859, Como became the place where several railroads came together, including the narrow-gauge railroad that became Boreas Pass. With the decline of mining came the decline of these towns, and Como became almost a ghost town. It still has a little bit of that feel today, although people still do live here and you can still stay at the Como Hotel and see the railroad roundhouse and the depot.
The road over Boreas Pass follows the path of the old narrow-gauge railroad for most of the way over the pass. The exception was a small section where it was just too expensive to widen the railroad bed for the road. The railroad at this point hugs the side of the mountain and a section of the original track is still there. I would imagine that it was rather scary for those riding on the train to look out the window and see nothing but the valley floor, several hundred feet down. Indeed, we read stories of locomotives that ran off the tracks at this point and had to be winched back up the side of the mountain.
We got out of the car at the summit of Boreas Pass, elevation 11,482 feet. Especially for those of us in the back seat, getting jostled for long periods of time can be rather tiring. We hiked a little ways down the Black Powder Pass Trail to stretch our legs for a while.
As has been the pattern for the last few days, it began to rain as we were descending from the pass. It was pouring as we drove through Breckenridge and on towards Keystone.
We have now entered an entirely different vibe on this side of the mountain. We have spent the last several days exploring beautiful wilderness areas, sometimes not seeing another person for long periods of time. Now we are in the region of ski resorts, large high-rise condominiums, pricey shoppes, and lots of people. Even in the off-season and in the rain, Breckenridge was rather busy.
We have two top-floor condominiums in Keystone for our family gathering, for a total of 26 people. When we arrived, several family members were already there, trying to find space for all the groceries for 26 people for the next four days. In the midst of this all, one of the family prepared a meal of sloppy joes and fruit and we prepared for breakfast, as we are on deck for tomorrow morning.
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